OS Battery Life Issues?

OS Battery Life Issues?

I just recently picked up the OS a couple days ago. Being my first android phone I didn't entirely know what to expect except that my battery life obviously wouldn't be as good as it is with a dumb phone... That being said, I didn't expect it to be this bad.

The first thing I noticed is that it was charging extremely slow. I don't have an exact time, however, I'm estimating it took around 5 hours for it to charge, and that was from starting at around 40% life out of the box.

Anyways, later that night when it was finally fully charged I went to bed and when I woke up the next morning the battery was down to 50%. I said okay, looks like I'll have to start leaving my phone on the charger all night.

Once I finally get it charged up again, I go about the rest my day as usual and about 6 hours into it it's telling me to put it on the charger. I sent a lot of texts, had skype running, and that's really it. I have wifi, bluetooth, gps, and autosyncing all off.

I decided to install juice defender and I managed to bump my battery life up to about 10 hours, however, despite being somewhat new to the world of android I feel this is still too low.

Thanks to the wonderful help of this forum I was easily able to root it. I installed setcpu and underclocked it a bit. I haven't really noticed an increase in battery life, per se, however, the phone now charges much faster than it did at first.

I've been modifying computers and gaming consoles all my life, so I feel that should give me helping hand as I venture into this vast world of mobile phones, but I'm still learning and don't really know where to go from here. So I ask, any ideas what could be up? How does your battery compare to mine?

One more thing worth noting is that I get pretty poor signal where I am, and the phone is constantly fighting for 3G. So I'm sure that's adding fuel to the fire.

Also I've just installed TitaniumBackup and have begun to freeze some of the bloatware although I doubt that will do much. I'm also going to attempt to calibrate the battery. Any suggestions at all regarding this would be greatly appreciated.

If it wasn't for the disappointing battery life I would be in love with this. It does well enough keeping up with my girlfriend's HTC mytouch 4G, the only difference is that the mytouch has been on all day and the battery is still at 86%!

As a starting point, go into Settings>About phone>Battery use. This will at least let you know if there's a rogue app using a ton of battery. Cell standby is usually on the top of the list for me, and probably will be for you too if you don't have that great of a signal.

Besides that, 10 hours is around the normal amount for me with moderate use. Milage will vary depending on what is running/installed.

Re: OS Battery Life Issues?

It's too bad there isn't an easy way for Android users to run a battery calibration without rooting the phone. I found that after I removed the batterystats.bin file, my battery life went from 5-6 hours to about 17 hours.

The the original poster - your first day experience mirrored mine - phone came "charged" out of the box with about 40%, I charged it up to 100% and it shut off after about 5-6 hours. Of course I then rooted my phone and cleared the battery stats, and subsequent charges lasted about 17 hours.

I do echo the other commenters about disabling unnecessary power drains, like Skype, but I also think that it's likely your phone's battery file is just mis-calibrated. Unfortunately I don't have a solution for how to fix that without rooting the phone; it's possible that file will get updated over time with just continuous full charging and discharging.

One hint that I've seen that may help you - next time you charge your phone, be sure to turn it completely OFF once it reaches 100% and let it stay connected to the charger while your phone's LED light shows green for at least 4-5 hours. This will allow the phone to "top up" its charge without the OS interfering (that's the theory at least). Then, turn on your phone, wait until it's booted up completely, unplug it from the charger and use it until it completely shuts down on its own; it may complain about wanting to be connected to the charger at less than 10%, but ignore that and keep going until the phone actually turns itself off.

Re: OS Battery Life Issues?

Thanks for all the replies.

I turned off skype and I also topped up my battery and let it completely discharge so it would have one complete cycle.

Not quite sure what my total battery life time is at the moment, but I ran it all day yesterday and after 12 hours it still had about 58% charge left, so that's a huge improvement and I'm honestly quite happy with it.

My main goal was to simply get it to last throughout a whole day under normal use and it's easily exceeding that now.

I guess I underestimated how much of a hog Skype was. Definitely only going to be turning it on when I need it.

One more question, how come under Settings>About phone>Battery use it didn't list Skype at all as using any battery? Probably a noob question but I'm still an android noob. I'm quite liking it so far, but of course it's Linux, so that's to be expected. Thanks for everything!

Re: OS Battery Life Issues?

Re: OS Battery Life Issues?

I installed SetCPU and changed the default governer to "ondemand" from "performance" and now my battery lasts almost 30 hours! Before this change I was lucky if I got 18 hours. I highly recommend this change; seems to have no downside at all; the performance seems just the same as before.

Re: OS Battery Life Issues?

Originally Posted by oatflake

I installed SetCPU and changed the default governer to "ondemand" from "performance" and now my battery lasts almost 30 hours! Before this change I was lucky if I got 18 hours. I highly recommend this change; seems to have no downside at all; the performance seems just the same as before.

Do you have the Min/Max both set at 800MHz? Also, do you have any kind of profiles added for SetCPU? And I saw in another post of yours that you managed to get 18 hours from draining the battery and then removing the batterystats. Did you completely drain the battery to where it wouldnt turn on, then charged it to 100% (with the phone off), and then you went into recovery and did the reset batterystats correct? Just want to make sure I do that correctly when I charge it tonight.

Re: OS Battery Life Issues?

Originally Posted by brian117

Do you have the Min/Max both set at 800MHz? Also, do you have any kind of profiles added for SetCPU? And I saw in another post of yours that you managed to get 18 hours from draining the battery and then removing the batterystats. Did you completely drain the battery to where it wouldnt turn on, then charged it to 100% (with the phone off), and then you went into recovery and did the reset batterystats correct? Just want to make sure I do that correctly when I charge it tonight.

This is what I did, in order:

1. Charged up stock phone while OFF, removed batterystats, ran phone down until it completely turned itself off. I then charged up the phone, still OFF. The next day, I got 18 hours of battery life, and did for many days after!

2. I then got SetCPU installed. I set the default governer to "ondemand" with minimum at the lower it could go and the maximum at 800Mhz. No profiles were set, nothing else. That day I got close to 23 hours of use, next day I got 30 hours. No reseting of battery stats; I changed nothing else. Phone seemed to work fine, except that I did notice that a few times the phone took a bit longer to wake up from sleep; up to 8 seconds one time. So that got me tweaking around with profiles.

3. I then adjusted SetCPU by setting the default governer still at "ondemand", max=800 mhz min=196 mhz, then enabled profiles. I have two profiles set now: Screen Off which is ondemand max=480 mhz, min=196, and In Call, which is performance max=800 min=800 (I don't think the max/min settings on performance actually matter). I haven't run my phone down completely, but I am getting about 40 hours when I still have about 10% left on my battery at the end of the day. The wake on sleep issue still happens, but it's less than 4 seconds when it does, and the performance when I'm interacting with it is just as zippy as it was when it was set to performance.

I haven't had a desire to tweak with it further - it seems to perform just great now, and getting almost 2 full days worth of battery life is good enough for me.

Re: OS Battery Life Issues?

Originally Posted by oatflake

This is what I did, in order:

1. Charged up stock phone while OFF, removed batterystats, ran phone down until it completely turned itself off. I then charged up the phone, still OFF. The next day, I got 18 hours of battery life, and did for many days after!

2. I then got SetCPU installed. I set the default governer to "ondemand" with minimum at the lower it could go and the maximum at 800Mhz. No profiles were set, nothing else. That day I got close to 23 hours of use, next day I got 30 hours. No reseting of battery stats; I changed nothing else. Phone seemed to work fine, except that I did notice that a few times the phone took a bit longer to wake up from sleep; up to 8 seconds one time. So that got me tweaking around with profiles.

3. I then adjusted SetCPU by setting the default governer still at "ondemand", max=800 mhz min=196 mhz, then enabled profiles. I have two profiles set now: Screen Off which is ondemand max=480 mhz, min=196, and In Call, which is performance max=800 min=800 (I don't think the max/min settings on performance actually matter). I haven't run my phone down completely, but I am getting about 40 hours when I still have about 10% left on my battery at the end of the day. The wake on sleep issue still happens, but it's less than 4 seconds when it does, and the performance when I'm interacting with it is just as zippy as it was when it was set to performance.

I haven't had a desire to tweak with it further - it seems to perform just great now, and getting almost 2 full days worth of battery life is good enough for me.

Try a higher minimum than 196 and you might find even more improved battery life. I've found 480 is the best for me, the slower the cpu runs the longer it has to chew on tasks which takes more battery life.

Re: OS Battery Life Issues?

Originally Posted by oatflake

This is what I did, in order:

1. Charged up stock phone while OFF, removed batterystats, ran phone down until it completely turned itself off. I then charged up the phone, still OFF. The next day, I got 18 hours of battery life, and did for many days after!

2. I then got SetCPU installed. I set the default governer to "ondemand" with minimum at the lower it could go and the maximum at 800Mhz. No profiles were set, nothing else. That day I got close to 23 hours of use, next day I got 30 hours. No reseting of battery stats; I changed nothing else. Phone seemed to work fine, except that I did notice that a few times the phone took a bit longer to wake up from sleep; up to 8 seconds one time. So that got me tweaking around with profiles.

3. I then adjusted SetCPU by setting the default governer still at "ondemand", max=800 mhz min=196 mhz, then enabled profiles. I have two profiles set now: Screen Off which is ondemand max=480 mhz, min=196, and In Call, which is performance max=800 min=800 (I don't think the max/min settings on performance actually matter). I haven't run my phone down completely, but I am getting about 40 hours when I still have about 10% left on my battery at the end of the day. The wake on sleep issue still happens, but it's less than 4 seconds when it does, and the performance when I'm interacting with it is just as zippy as it was when it was set to performance.

I haven't had a desire to tweak with it further - it seems to perform just great now, and getting almost 2 full days worth of battery life is good enough for me.

Thank you. Just reset battery stats after a complete drain and recharge with the phone off and will drain tonight to charge it back up to 100%. Then I will do the SetCPU options you provided. Will let you know if I see an increase in battery life!

Re: OS Battery Life Issues?

I had the same problem with the optimus v and this phone also, what it is its your data being on, wether youre using it or not, make sure to turn of any data connections (3g, wifi etc) when youre not using it. your battery should last pretty long then depending on what you use your phone for, games etc, but most of the battery consumtion comes from your data being on.
I leave everything off till ineed to use it then when im done i turn it off, i saw a darastic change in my battery savings when i started doing this.

also, install a task killer to kill any unwanted apps or processes you dont use, same with your cpu speed, set it at a low minimum and select ondemand. you should be have to have your phone last you a good day, maybe day and a half.

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